David Thompson's final column for 3:AM.]]> By David Thompson.

Last year, I wrote a blog post titled ‘It’s Okay to Dislike Islam’. In it, I argued:

“One of the creeping, unanalysed myths of our time is that it is somehow wrong to dislike Islam, or any part thereof, and wrong to take a dim view of its tenets and demands, and wrong to take a still dimmer view of the figure who founded it. I can practically hear the distant tutting and grunts of disapproval. Poor Islam. Poor Muslims. Their beliefs are being mocked. How hurtful. How “racist”. How terribly unfair.

No. It’s not unfair at all. What’s unfair is a demand for unearned deference and a unilateral exemption from the testing of ideas. What’s unfair, indeed despicable, are efforts by Islamic groups to cow dissent and stifle criticism with a well-rehearsed pantomime of victimhood and the projection of false motives. Pretending to be hurt in order to assert one’s will over others, or to gain unreciprocated favours, or to exert control over what others may say and think, is cowardly and malign. Let me say that once again. It’s cowardly and malign.”

At the time, I feared I might be stating the blindingly obvious. Thankfully, the Independent on Sunday suggests the sentiments above may still, to some, be novel. Peter Popham and Thais Portilho-Shrimpton apparently find it “astonishing” that an author, i.e. someone whose livelihood presupposes a freethinking society, should take a strong dislike to those aspects of Islam, often labelled Islamism, that are explicitly antithetical to a freethinking society:

“The novelist Ian McEwan has launched an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism, saying that he “despises” it and accusing it of “wanting to create a society that I detest”. His words, in an interview with an Italian newspaper, could, in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.”

At this point, perhaps it’s worth bearing in mind just what kind of world Islamist groups wish to share with us, whether we like it or not. Consider, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps the foremost Islamist group, which declares its aim as the “widespread implementation of Islam as a way of life; no longer to be sidelined as merely a religion.” In 2004, the Brotherhood’s president, Muhammad Mehdi Akef, told the Egyptian newspaper al-Arabi: “Islam will invade Europe and America because Islam has a mission.” Later the same year, Mehdi described the Holocaust as “a myth” and insisted that, when in power, the Brotherhood would not recognise Israel, whose demise he “expected soon”. Mehdi views “martyrdom operations” in Palestine and Iraq as a religious duty and has described all Israelis – including children - as “enemies of Islam”. The Brotherhood’s literature and website still bears the charming prophesy: “Islam will dominate the world.”

If some among us don’t find the above quite enough to warrant concern or contempt, perhaps we should remember the words of Ragab Hilal Hamida, a Brotherhood MP and former member of the jihadist group Jama’at al-Takfir Wa al-Hijra, who in 2006 told the Egyptian weekly Roz al-Yusouf: “Terrorism is not a curse when given its true [religious] meaning. From my point of view, bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi are not terrorists… I support all their activities.” When asked if such statements might reflect badly on the public perception of Islam, Hamida replied, “Islam does not need improvement of its image.”

In light of such statements, and many others like them, what is astonishing is the notion that a dislike of Islamism, or of Islam generally, should invite fears of “hate crime” investigation. As I’ve said before, religious freedom does not entail sparing believers any hint that others do not share their beliefs or indeed find them ludicrous. There is, after all, no corresponding obligation for believers to embrace ideas that are not clearly risible, monstrous or disgusting. But, again, perhaps I’m stating the obvious.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
David Thompson is a freelance writer whose work appears in The Observer, The Times and The Guardian. He is also a regular contributor to Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design. An archive of his work can be found at his website.

David Thompson's regular column for 3:AM returns. ]]> By David Thompson.

What to Think, Not How

During Evan Coyne Maloney’s 90-minute documentary, Indoctrinate U, the historian Daniel Pipes shares his impression of the modern American university: “It’s like joining a church; you have to be a believer. You have to have the right set of views.” The nature of those views and how they’re enforced is ably documented, as example after example prompts both hilarity and alarm. During the opening titles, Professor David Clemens of Monterey Peninsula College reads out a directive regarding new course proposals: “Include a description of how course topics are treated to develop a knowledge and understanding of race, class and gender issues.” We learn that this directive isn’t confined to courses in, say, sociology or politics, but is expected of all subjects, including mathematics and ornamental horticulture. Failure to comply is not a trivial matter and, as Clemens later points out, “They’re quite ruthless about their desire for a kinder, gentler world.”

Maloney’s film begins with the campus free speech activism of the 1960s and 70s, in which his own parents took part, before highlighting how dramatically those principles have now been discarded, even upended, in many of the same universities. We see conservative speakers being shouted down, intimidated and howled off stage, unable even to start an exchange of ideas. We hear students’ accounts of incongruous political sermons being shoehorned onto lessons. (“I’ve been learning in geography class that gender is socially constructed.”) We also see a procession of academics voicing their dismay at the belligerent orthodoxy of campus politics. One psychology professor, Laura Freberg, recounts being told, “We never would have hired you if we knew you were a Republican.”

Freberg’s story is among the film’s more disturbing revelations, in that it shows how the most innocuous of details can identify someone as incompatible with orthodoxy and a target for punishment. Freberg explains how despite her excellent performance she was labelled a “problem” by her colleagues and subjected to a campaign of harassment until finally, and successfully, she sought legal remedy. Freberg’s students later admitted they’d known she was a “closet Republican” precisely because she didn’t use the classroom to air her political views.

Despite Maloney’s own right-of-centre leanings, Indoctrinate U is surprisingly non-party political and, as FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff explains, many mainstream Democrats could well be shocked by how a supposed marketplace of ideas has become so intolerant and congealed. Indeed, one wonders how many liberal parents would regard Bucknell’s Professor Geoff Schneider, who confidently asserts, “A lot of our students are unconsciously racist”, and who defines as harassment “anything that offends.” Or Professor Noel Ignatiev of the Massachusetts School of Art, who echoes the sentiments of Dr Shakti Butler and Peggy McIntosh, and says, “My concern is doing away with whiteness. Whiteness is a form of racial oppression… Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” (Schneider and Ignatiev are, of course, both white.) At Tufts and Brown universities we see how a fixation with identity politics and leftwing grievance theatre has resulted in racially segregated student orientations. Elsewhere, students are offered racially segregated housing, even segregated graduation ceremonies, and all in the name of multicultural “diversity”.

Maloney also highlights the spread of “speech codes” on hundreds of campuses, the particulars of which include, at Brown, the “banning of verbal behaviour” that “produces feelings of impotence, anger or disenfranchisement.” The University of Connecticut prohibits “inappropriately directed laughter”, while other campuses, including Colby College, have outlawed any speech deemed to result in a loss of self-esteem. Also documented are the absurd and sinister travails of several students, among them Steve Hinkle, whose flyer – advertising a speech by a black conservative author and quoting the title of his book – led to police involvement, lengthy entanglement in campus judicial proceedings and suggestions that he should seek psychological “counselling”.

Other extraordinary moments include San Francisco State University’s vehemently “pacifist” anti-military protests; the banning of patriotic expressions and symbols, including the American flag and the pledge of allegiance; and a satirical “affirmative action bake sale”, with cupcakes sold at different prices according to a person’s colour. (Needless to say, this culinary satire isn’t received terribly well and threats of arrest ensue.)

A recurrent and revealing theme is just how readily these PC principles can be abandoned if the target is deemed politically deviant. Sukhmani Singh Khalsa, a conservative Sikh student critical of liberal bias, was unwittingly sent an email from the University of Tennessee’s Issues Committee, a student group responsible for inviting speakers to campus. Justin Rubenstein, an Issues Committee member, referred to Khalsa in less than edifying terms: “If you see one of those ragheads, shoot him right in the fucking face.” The University of Tennessee saw fit not to discipline Rubenstein or remove him from the committee. Yet when students at that same university arrived at an off-campus Halloween party dressed as the Jackson Five and complete with “black” makeup, this attention to detail resulted in the entire fraternity being suspended.

Maloney’s attempts to raise these concerns with university administrators are, alas, unsuccessful, and of course symbolic. Invariably polite and decidedly unthreatening, our hero nonetheless finds himself rebuffed, then escorted off campus by burly security guards. Maloney’s alma mater, Bucknell, proves no more accommodating. (Watching these encounters almost becomes a game - guessing exactly how little time will pass before spotting the Stare of Death™ and hearing the administrator say, “Call the campus police.”) Some viewers may wonder if many faculty members are bewitched by the homogeneity of their insulated fiefdoms and are thus unaccustomed to their assumptions being challenged. Others may suspect that some of these educators are less naïve and all too happy to do in private what they cannot defend in public. Either way, a question arises for supporters of identity politics and pretentious sensitivity: What happens when the most oppressive “hegemony” in town is, in fact, your own?

Those lucky enough to see Maloney’s film may differ in their views of exactly how this political lockstep became so pervasive and entrenched. Fixated by a Holy Trinity of race, class and gender, leftist ideologues have certainly played a pivotal role; as have squeamish administrators anxious to avoid controversy. Few, though, could deny that a serious problem exists. On the subject of an increasingly politicised classroom and the reluctance to voice unfashionable views, one student points out perhaps the greatest sin of all: “Education becomes a spectator sport.” Charming, alarming and not quite polished, Indoctrinate U is likely to amuse and enrage in more or less equal measure. If you can, see it. Then get angry.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
David Thompson is a freelance writer whose work appears in The Observer, The Times and The Guardian. He is also a regular contributor to Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design. An archive of his work can be found at his website.

James Daly pays tribute to the late Jeremy Beadle.]]> By James Daly.

British TV has lost one of its finest stars of the later 80’s and 90’s: Jeremy Beadle , the man with a big personality, a big heart and one small, baby sized hand has died of severe pneumonia at the age of fifty-nine.

Jeremy rose to prominence through the shows Beadle’s About and You’ve Been Framed. The premise of Beadle’s About was that Jeremy, the host, would basically pull mischievous and slightly twattish practical ‘jokes’ on people. This would all be filmed on hidden camera and when the unlucky victim was near to having a nervous breakdown, Jeremy, would very sinisterly pop out of nowhere dressed as a very dodgy-looking copper. The poor bastard on the receiving end of the joke would go absolutely mental at the ‘copper’ and, after a bit more banter, Jeremy would rip off his disguise and everything was okay again. The victim would call Jeremy some bad names at first but then, after he or she had calmed down, they had a hug although Jeremy never shook hands with anyone.

In the late 80’s this was TV gold. At its peak the show drew 15m viewers. How we all laughed when on one show Jeremy staged a mock alien landing in one poor lady’s back garden with a full spaceship and everything. Jeremy, dressed as an alien inside the dodgiest eighties costume ever, came out of the ’spaceship’ and started to talking to this woman who asked “Does it want to come in and have a a cup of tea?”

It seemed that at the heart of the humour and therefore the attraction of the show was the base cruelty of the jokes. I remember being very young and watching with great anticipation as some poor sod parked his car and went shopping. Whilst the man was inside, Jeremy’s ‘crew’ swapped the car (a brand new Mercedes or something similar) for an exact replica. As the man came out and approached what he believed to be his car, the small-hand-wielding fiend Jeremy blew it up!! The guy who thinks that this is his brand new Mercedes is nearly crying and we, the ‘great’ British public, are pissing ourselves laughing from the comfort of our armchairs. But then of course Jeremy would rip off his disguise and everything would be ok again – “You little tinker you, Jeremy!!!”

Because of the rather cruel nature of his TV shows, he had a rather love-hate relationship with the public. It’s strange, not only did he have a baby hand to contend with but he looked liked the kind of guy who would steal your grandma and sell her for camels or something. But it is said that he raised over 100m pounds for leukaemia and other charities and that, in person, he was a top bloke.

For me personally, I like laughing at other people’s comedy misfortunes so Jeremy’s shows were a massive part of my youth. Indeed, for many people around my and much older, Jeremy has a certain cult status. I remember once, in the back of a taxi in Australia with two friends, we were all quite quiet until someone leaned over and asked me “James, what would you do if Jeremy Beadle started cupping your balls with his baby hand?”

Of course The Hand, something so small that took on a large significance. It’s what we associate Jeremy with when we talk about him and, like him with his mischievous or sneaky prankster ways, it can be viewed as either a bit scary (imagine if he stroked your face with it….) or just merely harmlessly funny. It is easy to joke about it and make fun of it, but hell, he played a lot of tricks on people. Stunted appendage or not, a legend of British TV has left the building.

On final reflection I would like to think that I can give him a true entertainer’s send off and give him a big hand…. I mean a round of applause. Jeremy, we salute you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Daly is a twenty-six year part-time funk and soul DJ and full-time teaching assistant currently living in Tokyo with his wife.

Charles Thomson tells 3:AM why the Turner Prize isn't even worth protesting against this year.]]> By Charles Thomson, co-founder of the Stuckists art group.

For the first time since 2000 there will not be a Stuckist demonstration at the Turner Prize. This is due to industrial action: the Stuckists are coming out on strike in protest at the lameness of this year’s show, which does not merit the accolade of the traditional demo.

We apologise for any disappointment this may cause.

[Paul Myners, Tate Chairman, with Charles Thomson at the 2006 Turner Prize Stuckist demo. Photo: Rick Friend]

Paul Myners, Tate Chairman (prominent businessman and consultant to the Treasury Department), thanked us in person at last year’s demo for giving the Tate extra publicity. If he expects the benefit of our presence, then he will have to do better than just recycling previous nominees, who only deserve one demo at the outside. Two of this year’s four nominees have been nominated in the past. This shows a distinct laziness by the jury.

[Stuckist Turner Prize demonstrators at the Tate in 2000: copycat Mark Wallinger gets a Turner nomination]

Former Turner winner, Grayson Perry has observed in The Times that we “lend a festive air to the queue to get in”. We are sorry that the proceedings will get off to a lame start, but again, it is up to him to use his influence to get more used condoms and hacked up animal carcasses as exhibits. This year there is a doll’s house, which simply doesn’t merit the effort of protesting against it; and the video of some idiot in a bear costume wandering round a museum is indistinguishable from a Stuckist demonstrator anyway.

[Sir Nicholas Serota, Tate Director, at the 2006 Turner Prize Stuckist demo with a protest leaflet depicting him behind Tracey Emin’s knickers. Photo: Rick Friend]

We apologise to those guests who have waited patiently in past years to get protest leaflets signed — and on occasion taken a placard into the event — especially those guests related to the Tate Director.

This year, for the first time, the Prize is being held not at Tate Britain, but at Tate Liverpool. We also apologise to the Tate Liverpool attendants, who told one of our artists they were looking forward to our presence, and to the people of Liverpool, who have contacted us directly to ask if we will be there. We assure them there is no slight intended to the City, whose fine Walker Art Gallery hosted a major show, The Stuckists Punk Victorian, in 2004. But if the Tate expects us to make the effort of standing in the wet and cold all day, then they have to learn we cannot be taken for granted.

In 2005, just before he presented the Prize, then-Culture Minister, David Lammy, said on live national TV, “Every year, the Turner Prize makes contemporary art the talk of the airwaves … Stuckists threaten never to paint again.” (He almost got it right.) The Tate cannot say they were not warned.

[In 2005, the Prize was awarded to Simon Starling, who converted a shed into a boat and then back into a shed again. Painting by Mark D]

It is desperately necessary to upgrade the standards of the prize which has steadily degraded into increasing blandness. What is needed is someone whose manic personality is guaranteed to give some zest to proceedings by doing all the wrong things. We suggest possibly Billy Childish (Co-founder, now ex-, Stuckist), who is incapable of not speaking his mind, and Stella Vine (another former Stuckist) who is well known as the loosest cannon since the Battle of Trafalgar. However, we understand the natural reluctance of the Tate to nominate people who paint pictures for a prize named after a painter.

The winner of the Turner Prize will be announced on UK Channel 4 news at 7pm on Monday 3 December. More information on the Stuckists demonstrations is at the Stuckist site and Wikipedia.

(Stuck Inn I, II and III)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Thomson was the only person in 10 years to fail the painting degree at Maidstone College of Art. In 1979, he was a founder member of The Medway Poets, and then a full-time poet for 13 years, with work in over 100 anthologies. In 1999 he named, co-founded and has since been the driving force of the Stuckism movement, which now numbers more than 150 groups in 38 countries. He has demonstrated for 7 years outside the Turner Prize, and in 2005 applied under the Freedom of Information Act for Tate trustee minutes about the gallery’s purchase of its trustee Chris Ofili’s work. This led in 2006 to the Charity Commission’s ruling that the Tate had been acting illegally for the last 50 years. His painting satirising Sir Nicholas Serota, whose face peers over a large pair of (Tracey Emin’s) red knickers, is a well-known image. He was briefly married to artist Stella Vine in 2001.

Jim Martin returns to the fray with his Toxic Thought Syndrome column for 3:AM.]]> By Jim Martin.

I’m told that the Holy Bible is the word of God on earth. This book contains truths that can move the faithful to tears of joy and reverance. And the facts in the bible provide the irrefutable proof that Jesus Chris is the living son of God who died and was risen again. You can point to proof of the existence of this man and to proof that at least somewhat backs up the facts of the bible. It’s all very real, they say, and those things you cannot prove should be accepted on faith. The funny thing is that Intelligent Design, like many other modern alterations to the faith, is little more than just another gaping hole in the armour of faith.

We accepted Creationism for an awful long time. Some of the more frightening salvaged souls still believe it in the face of a shocking amount of data to the contrary using the same sorts of logical refutations as holocaust deniers and eight year olds. But Darwin came along with his whacky theory of evolution and put out the kind of visible and verifiable proof that many Christians simply couldn’t argue against. So they did the next best thing. They adapted. They evolved. They said, “Fine, we now accept evolution, but we’ll call it Intelligent Design and say that it was the means by which God created life on earth.” It’s certainly a simplistic means to absorb the change offered by Darwin and maintain the faith, but that is simply at a surface level.

Beneath the surface lies the truth. By needing to adapt, what they’re saying is that there are factual errors in the Bible. And honestly, we’ve known that it contained plenty of these for ages. More and more we’re learning that the book is full of inconsistencies and untruths. Through modern archaeological findings we’re learning that the truth behind the plight of the Jews in Egypt is far different from how the stories make it out to be. We know through our advances in geology that dinosaurs did not roam the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve but had in fact died out millions of years before the first appearance of man. We know through the historical record that the books are inconsistent with historical facts and are also inconsistent with other examples of the same book. They were tampered with many times by many fingers, adding whatever bits made the most sense to them at the time.

At what point do thinking people finally ask themselves how this all works? If the proof of Christ’s divinity is in the truth of the bible and we know that the bible isn’t true, doesn’t that cast natural doubts on Christ’s divinity? What can we trust from the source if we know more and more that it is full of untruths?

Believe in God if you must. Believe in a kindly creator (kind enough to have unleashed the plagues of Egypt on his favorite people’s enemies) if that’s what gets you through the night. But can we please stop pretending that this book has any facts in it at all? It’s innaccurate and anachronistic at best, and we know better now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Martin is a former editor of 3:AM, front man for the obscure punk rock band Johnny Incognito, and just a heck of a nice guy.

Rolands Kelts' latest column for 3:AM. ]]>

By Roland Kelts.

I landed in Tokyo to another round of interviews about Japanamerica. One was for a spread in a sleek Japanese glossy aimed at high-spending hobbyists (Japanese men with money). The other was for Warner Home Entertainment, producers of the forthcoming Appleseed: Ex Machina DVD, which will be released in the United States in 2008.

The editor of the glossy had read my book very carefully, and his questions were spot-on inquiries into the differing perceptions and often divergent audiences for anime and manga in the United States versus Japan. He wanted to know why Americans think being an otaku is cool and what kind of Americans are actually into this stuff.

A few days later, I was invited to attend an advance screening of Appleseed: Ex Machina at the Toei Co. headquarters in Ginza. I had written about its precursor, 2004’s Appleseed, in the closing pages of my book.

The new film, which opens theatrically in Japan on Oct. 20, is no letdown. Visually stunning, ripe with action and hyperkinetic acrobatics, it manages to combine the characteristic aesthetics of anime with the narrative pacing and stunt-riddled energy of a Hollywood blockbuster.

This should surprise precisely no one. Shinji Aramaki, the veteran anime director and designer, knows how to fill a screen without overburdening the audience. And on Ex Machina, he is joined by Hollywood and Hong Kong superstar John Woo, who seems to have streamlined the screenplay and sharpened the characters, rendering the saga’s philosophical flavors more palatable to the uninitiated. Add Miuccia Prada to the mix (she designed two of the heroine’s costumes), plus a soundtrack by the regrouped Yellow Magic Orchestra and globally renowned deejay and musician Keigo Oyamada, better known as Cornelius, and you have an anime aimed at audiences everywhere.

Still, what I found most striking amid the blazing computer graphics were the women.

There is the spunky, sharp-shooting heroine, of course, caught in this edition of the story between one lover who has become a cyborg and another who looks and behaves exactly like the other guy did–before he was mechanized. (Try that on for a threesome!) But even more compelling in this postapocalyptic anime world: Every position of true leadership and political power is held by a woman.

Overseeing the governing body, a kind of futuristic United Nations, in Ex Machina’s new world of 2135 is the red-haired Athena. And she’s no Sailor Moon pixie. Though she appears to have gone under the knife since her debut in ‘04–where she often looked haggard and sleepless, with notable bags beneath her eyes–she is clearly a middle-aged woman, mature and serious about her responsibilities.

Anthena’s brow furrows as she wrestles with the dilemmas of her day–political uprisings, infighting and corruption, not to mention a mind-controlling virus. And she is no longer under the thumb of a council of geriatric men, as she was in the first Appleseed. She is alone at the podium, maintaining order over an international congress of crabby, infantile men who can’t seem to get it together or even get along without her discipline.

When the spreading mind-control virus forces her to enter into negotiations with the leader of a massive corporate entity, yet another mature and powerful woman appears, the dark-haired Yoshino.

Watching the two women face off for their summit on the giant screen, both looking intensely focused and thoughtful, I had a sudden brain wave: There they were, Benazir Bhutto and Hillary Clinton, negotiating the fate of global security amid the outbreak of terrorism in some city of the future.

As reported in the Yomiuri just recently, anime and manga audiences in the United States are now predominantly female. Manga publishers, producers and importers such as TokyoPop and Viz Media all reported growth surges in their female consumer base at the start of this century, and the female market continues to expand.

In other words, as I told the hobby mag editor, the kind of people into this stuff are often the kind with two X chromosomes.

This was borne out during my U.S. and British book tour appearances, where I was frequently startled by the number of young women in the audiences, some bearing their books earmarked to the specific pages about which they had questions. And the female readers have proven far likelier than their male counterparts to follow up on their inquiries, contacting me either through the book’s Web site or the publisher or via postal mail.

Indeed, a foreign fan of manga and anime might be forgiven for assuming that Japan, creative nerve center for the artwork itself, is a global leader in gender equity.

Yet just last month, The New York Times ran a damning indictment of Japan’s actual treatment of women in the workplace, noting that in 2005, women held a mere 10.1 percent of all management jobs in Japanese companies and government. (The U.S. figure is 42.5 percent.) In the United Nations index of gender empowerment, a survey of 75 countries, Japan ranks 42nd, far below Asian neighbors such as Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. The article predicts dire consequences for a nation with an anemic birthrate and looming labor shortages.

Perhaps the young female fans lapping up anime titles such as Appleseed know exactly what they’re getting into: a portrait of a future that not only looks new, but may also be necessary.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roland Kelts is the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US, out in paperback this November.

Picture: Roland Kelts outside Cafe Manga on London’s South Bank, by Andrew Stevens.

A version of this piece originally appeared in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper.

George Berger's latest slab of truth.]]>

The city I love is in Eastern Europe, but other than that shall remain nameless. I hope you won’t be able to guess from this article.

Because travel writing is dead. What was once a pioneering report from the frontline about a place we would (probably not) be lucky to go once in a lifetime is now simply an invitation to blunder off on a cheap flight and impose all your values on the few remaining places not homogenised by an influx of travel readers.

The city I love wears a threadbare cardigan from one of its many secondhand shops. It wears its poverty on its sleeve, not intentionally like some rich kid London slummer, but like an alcoholic battered wife on the long slow road to recovery. Dignified as the bruises heal.

The city I love has a McDonalds of course. It had closed last time I was there, prompting a naïve leap in my heart until the refurbishment sign came into view. It also has a new shopping mall, is building a shiny new hotel and is expanding the (presently tiny) airport as more cheap flights begin to target it. The mechanical diggers of ‘progress’ loom into sight like Martians in War Of The Worlds.

But for now, the city I love is still largely untouched by the plague that has hit places like Prague. Close your mind and you could still be in the Cold War days, waiting for the Communist call. Now this I like.

In the five times I’ve spent here, I’ve been lucky enough to hear the English people / language only three brief times. With a heavy heart, I know it won’t last - like a snowdrop welcoming summer, the locals will welcome the tourists – they’ll welcome their money and what they perceive to be their glamour. Within ten years, English could become the main language and the city I love will look and feel more and more like Croydon.

Yes, the tourists are coming over the hill, and it’s enough to make me weep. So I’m certainly not going to hasten that process by naming the hill, lest travel writing speed up the death of any point to travelling in the first place. Put simply; if there are any places left worth writing about, then the last thing anyone should be doing is writing about them.

So, by way of consolation, let me give you a whistlestop tour of Brussels, as a whistlestop is surely all you’ll need. Brussels has a little fountain statue of a little boy peeing, surrounded by tourist shops selling related paraphernalia and chocolate, lots of chocolate. It’s near the only place truly worth seeing – the magnificent Grand Place, a square surrounded by awe-inspiring architechture. It also has a wonderful café restaurant called Falstaffs, which transports anyone with the slightest imagination back to the 1920s.

And unfortunately, that’s about it.

There was a beautiful moment: in a park on a bandstand on a blazing hot Saturday afternoon, a single clarinettist stood playing classical classics. All around people sat in silent contemplation, no doubt feeling the same cleansing of the soul as I was. Touched by some kind of purity, knowledge of beauty, in itself rare. Busking is the only honest music left.

On the subject of which, Brussels also has a Jacques Brel building, which provided the photograph for the banner on this page. And which was closed on a Sunday. So we walked over to the bar opposite only to hear them playing a tape of U2. Which is also enough to make me weep.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Berger’s latest book is The Story Of Crass. His previous one was a biography of The Levellers. His next one is under contemplation. He also fronts Flowers In The Dustbin and writes a blog from there.

When I later learned that the author was not who "he" claimed to be -- a street smart former drug abusing hustler -- but rather a fragile, middle-aged woman from Brooklyn Heights with childhood issues of her own. I wasn't angry or shocked. I understand that fiction is a trick done with mirrors.

Bob Thurber on the fallout of the J.T. Leroy saga.]]> By Bob Thurber.

Now that the civil trial against author Laura Albert (who employed the alter ego JT LeRoy for over a decade) is over, I can confess something.

I’m the real JT LeRoy.

Surprised? Shocked? 

No one could be more astonished by this revelation than I was. 

In the first place, I am not a former cross-dressing hustler/street urchin from West Virginia, and my mother, as far as I know, was never a crack-smoking truck-stop prostitute. She was, however, a naive teenager who gave birth to two children out of wedlock. Breeding bastards was a moral crime in the 1950s, so producing two made her an immediate outcast. Shunned and shamed, she lied about her past until the day she died. Continuously resentful of her children, she brutalized my sister and me throughout our childhood.

Though it’s true that Madonna never sent me a book on Kabbalah, the hardscrabble life that spurred a series of autobiographical tales thick with verisimilitude belongs to me. I’m the traumatized kid raised by the teenage mother who didn’t know nurturing from novocaine. (That’s not a plea for sympathy; just a point of fact.) I’m the boy who despite a childhood teeming with poverty and abuse grew up to find the transcendent healing power of art. 

Okay. In comparison, my own success has been moderate. A list of publication credits, a few awards. I don’t have anything close to “his” congregation of devoted readers, or “his” earnings from book and movie deals. But I do have my peace of mind and a sense of harmony — two rather unexpected gifts, I must admit.

So here I am.

Without the big sunglasses, floppy brimmed black hat, and blond wig.

Without the hype, the fluff, or the gender-crossing pseudonym. 

Without the celebrity pals — among them Bono, Melissa Etheridge, Courtney Love, Carrie Fisher, Sharon Osborn, Tatum O’Neal, Debbie Harry, Tom Waits, Winona Ryder, Liv Tyler, Dennis Cooper, Dorothy Allison, Dave Eggers, and Mary Gaitskill. (That’s the short list of the bamboozled.)

Here I am. The real deal. A nobody from nowhere who survived unimaginable (unless you’re Steven King) childhood horror and lived to tell about it, lived to write about it.
 
I’ve followed the JT Leroy saga as it has played out over the last year. I had read “his” short stories and been affected by the gritty subject matter. I didn’t adore the writing but I sympathized with the author’s background. Another lost child.

When I later learned that the author was not who “he” claimed to be — a street smart former drug abusing hustler — but rather a fragile, middle-aged woman from Brooklyn Heights with childhood issues of her own. I wasn’t angry or shocked. I understand that fiction is a trick done with mirrors. 

Now that the jig (or gig) is up Laura Albert admits to using “camouflage” over the past eleven years, though she claims her elaborate masquerade wasn’t a hoax, but a psychological survival mechanism for coping with her own childhood abuse.

The San Francisco Chronicle quotes author/activist, Michelle Tea as saying: “Laura Albert is a traitor to writing itself, specifically to memoir . . .  It’s such a slap to the artists who really are toiling away to create meaning from the hardships of their live. It turns the redemptive quality of a lot of writing into a total farce.” 

Perhaps Ms. Albert’s masquerade hurts the credibility of genuine survivors, but it’s minor damage. A piece of costume jewelry in the back of the drawer doesn’t decrease the value of the authentic gems. Now that the deception is over, I sympathize with Laura Albert as much as I did with her alter ego.  Living a lie for eleven years must have been excruciatingly painful.

It’s a tragedy the woman was unable to distinguish her true self among the ruins and needed to create an entity more traumatized by life than she herself had been. She followed a line of words and got her feet tangled in the process. But it’s no calamity that the autobiographical tales behind the published stories were concoctions, or that behind the memoir-style fiction was a fictional personality with a fake childhood. Fabrications, layer upon layer. When you think about it, that’s quite a literary achievement; pretty much a post-modern triumph.

In her preciously thin book “The Writing Life” Annie Dillard admits “The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good.” But she doesn’t mention that sometimes the air is bad and life stinks. 

Childhood trauma is so often the source of one’s art. Pain focuses the mind, and early wounds cut terribly deep. Without a time machine the injury can not be undone. There is no going back, only forward. This is the artist’s path. It’s in the forward movement that hope and healing may be found. It can be a long process, requiring years or decades for the ugly damage to be repaired. 

In a recent interview Ms. Albert referred to the JT persona as her “respirator.” She claims the mechanism allowed her to breathe.

I know about mechanisms (writing autobiographical fiction is certainly one) and I’m all for breathing. Perhaps, by acting out her complicated charade, Ms. Albert did herself more good than harm. Maybe now the woman can finally catch her breath.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Over the last few years Bob Thurber has published more than 200 short stories, appeared in 15 anthologies, and received  awards or citations in thirty writing competitions. Most recently he is the recipient of: The Marjory Bartlett Sanger Award, The 2006 Meridian Editors’ Prize, and The 2007 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize.

Michael Muhammad Knight responds to Andy Blade.]]> By Michael Muhammad Knight.

Responding to Andy Blade’s article, ‘Islam Calling’ puts me in a strange position, since I’m not generally perceived as a defender of Islam.  Muslims boycotted the website Progressive Islam after I wrote that if the Prophet Muhammad would not have approved of woman imams, then “the Prophet is wrong, shit on him.”  My articles have been threatened with legal action by the leadership of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and my novel on Islamic punk rockers has been confiscated in Malaysia and censored in the UK for fear of offending Muslims.  I have even stink-palmed Cat Stevens, who Blade treats fairly sympathetically in his piece.

But I do consider myself a Muslim, even if Andy Blade would dismiss me as not a “real-deal” Muslim.  Like the fundamentalists, he holds a simplistic view of Islam in which there’s no room for movement.  While respecting Andy as a musician, I’m thankful to say that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. 

Blade suggests that we compare Islamic khutbahs to church sermons, claiming that in the church we’re more likely to find laughter and love.  I wonder if he’s ever been on this side of the pond… maybe to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, where my grandfather, a Pentecostal minister, had children believing that his coal furnace fueled the fires of Hell.  Or Masjid Malcolm Shabazz in Harlem, where the imam cracks jokes and the women shout praises of “preach it brother imam!” during the sermon.  Blade employs his own first-hand encounters to make sweeping generalizations about the natures of various world religions, as though there’s uniformly one Islamic experience that we can measure against uniform Christianity or Buddhism.  Since there was no place for religious music in Blade’s particular Islamic background, he declares that “there are no such things as hymns in Muslim ceremonies,” but if there were, they would have the emotion of the “heaviest death metal anthems.”  Andy, have you ever heard of qawwalis, the devotional music of Chisti Sufism?  Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, maybe?  When Nusrat sings “Allah Hu,” does it sound like Morbid Angel?

I was at Masjid Malcolm Shabazz this past Friday.  It’s my favorite mosque, mainly for its rich history: this was where Malcolm X led New York’s chapter of the Nation of Islam.  After his assassination, the building was destroyed by arson and years later converted to a Sunni mosque by Warith Deen Mohammed, son of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.  It was Warith Deen who renamed the mosque in Malcolm’s honor.

The Friday sermon contained not a word of what Blade calls “harsh, guttural” Arabic.  Preaching to a largely non-Arabic speaking congregation, the imam made it plain.  “What’s the best thing you can wear?” he asked, then providing the answer: “a smile.”  He also told us to love Christians.  “You can’t force your religion on anyone,” he said, “not even your own children.”  It was an important statement for this congregation, which was made up of primarily African-American converts or the sons and daughters of converts, many with Christian families.  By the way, Andy, in a mosque like this one, the call to prayer doesn’t sound like an order or threat at all, but more like an old gospel song.

Andy Blade expresses his bewilderment that outsiders could be drawn to Islam’s “claustrophobic embrace.”  To convert of your own free will is “madness,” he says.  For some it is; when I first converted, I went pretty crazy with it, but after going through the extremes of both fundamentalism and apostasy, I think I’ve balanced out.  Now I’m just a Muslim the way I want to be.  I’m not going to apologise for the ugly side of an old religion, and I’m certainly not going to argue about what “true Islam” stands for.  There’s no such thing as True Islam.  Religion is symbols and forms, and the symbols mean essentially whatever people want them to.  Any religion can be read to support violence; during World War II, Zen Buddhist masters in Japan endorsed the killing of those who disturbed the public order.  Centuries before that, it was Buddhist mujahideen who drove the Mongols out of China.

Blade claims to tell us what the Qur’an “plainly says” without any consideration for the numerous ways in which Muslims relate to the text; in his view, only those who interpret the Qur’an literally are “real-deal Muslims.”  Though fundamentalists and apostates alike imagine Islam to be small and very clearly defined, Islam as I’ve experienced it is big and complicated, and much more intellectually diverse than Blade allows.  I have seen orthodox and conservative Muslim women who wrestle with verse 4:34 (regarding the beating of wives).  These are earnest Muslims who do believe in the Qur’an, but they are also serious feminists who will never accept or excuse domestic violence.  Dealing with the problematic 4:34, some look for historic context or scrutinize the language, some apply exegetical techniques similar to those used in reformist Judaism (which must address these same concerns in its own tradition), and others even challenge the authenticity of that verse.  There are many ways that someone can be a Muslim and have a relationship to the Qur’an; I’m still looking for mine, but I don’t think the knee-jerk literal reading is necessarily the most valid. 

Your experience is what it is, and the issues you mention are legitimate.  But it’s not enough for you to take the word Muslim away from me or my friends: Sunnis, Shi’as, anarchist Muslims, Muslim feminists who wear hijab, Muslim feminists who wear fishnets, progressive Muslims who get drunk, agnostics and atheists who claim Islam as their culture, traditional Sufis, crazy weed-addled Sufis, indigenous American heretics and lesbian Muslim drag-king punk singers.  Andy, you don’t know.  What’s worse, you don’t even know enough to know that you don’t know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Muhammad Knight is the author of The Taqwacores, recently reviewed on 3:AM. His American Muslim road odyssey, Blue Eyed Devil, has been praised as “today’s On the Road”.

Andy Blade argues that Islam is not a religion of peace.]]>

Andy Blade was lead singer with early punk legends Eater. He is also the author of one of the best punk memoirs ever published, The Secret Life of a Teenage Punk Rocker: The Andy Blade Chronicles. Andy still makes music, and has just recorded a new album all by himself. “Mi’amo Jihad” (video above) will be the first single from this new album. This animation video was produced by Hass, Andy’s brother, a “vociferous ‘apostate’” who recently lost faith in Islam after 25 years. 3:AM asked Andy Blade why he wrote this song:

Why did I write the song? Suicide martyrs are an old hobby horse of mine. Terrorism and Paedophilia are the only remaining taboos in both the media and society, both frighten the public, and the media, of course, love that. Acts of terror, by their very nature, are sensationalist. Sensationalism on the front page accompanied by a picture of an exploded car/train/plane/bus gives the green light to a government to rein us in and step up their own operations in the name of ’security’, which in turn, hands extremist groups excuses to bomb us. What “Mi’amo Jihad” represents is a middle finger to Big Brother, the populist media, the brainwashed tabloid readers and the brainwashed sheep who dream up and carry out these attacks. No one is ever going to achieve their aims by force anymore, be it the armies that represent our nations, the secret services or the ‘terrorists’, those days are gone. The world has changed. People are waking up and arming themselves, not with weapons, but with bullshit detectors. Bullshit detectors terrify goverments far more than a bomb ever can, providing us with an opportunity to laugh at these people instead of crying with despair. We’ve had enough vengeful rhetoric since 9/11 and it’s not working. Let’s be honest, the real reason the west has engaged upon this ‘war on terror’ is because our leaders will not tolerate the cage being rattled — the fact that the bogeymen cage-rattlers are Islamic funamentalists is neither here nor there. Wealth and power require order. Order cannot be maintained whilst the plebs are rattling the cage.

****

Here Andy Blade comments on the following Yahoo News item:

“Muslim groups in Britain placed advertisements in British national newspapers in praise of the emergency services and to declare that terrorism is ‘not in our name,’ borrowing the slogan from the mass protests in Britain against the invasion of Iraq. The ads from the Muslims United coalition also quoted the Quran: ‘Whoever kills an innocent soul, it is as if he killed the whole of mankind. And whoever saves one, it is as if he saved the whole of mankind’.” All well and good, but the Koran also states quite clearly that Jews, Christian, apostates, unbelievers etc. should be slain — and it doesn’t mean hypothetically either. It’s too late to go back and edit out the contradictions in the big book, so what are you left with? Moderates ignoring the ‘kill them all’ verses and extremists ignoring the ’save the souls’ declarations (of which there are far fewer than the ‘kill em all’ ones). You are an ‘unbeliever’ if you doubt one word of the Koran, which leaves Muslims in a bit of a quandary really, doesn’t it? The extremists, from my experience, seem to study the Koran in depth, the moderates, not so (and when they get to a nasty bit, they make excuses for what good old God actually meant, or they skip past it) which is why the extremists always claim to be the REAL deal Muslims — which, quite frankly, one would have to, statistically, agree with. So what is the point of ‘not in my name’? None whatsoever unless they create a new edition of the Koran. That would never happen though, because then they too would be unbelievers. What a fucking mess. Good luck Mr Brown. Good luck community leaders. Putting a PG rating on an 18 movie does not make it PG. True Islam (’as featured in the Koran’) is quite clearly not a religion of peace so I wish they’d stop fucking saying it was.

****

ISLAM CALLING

Despite an increasingly militant wind blowing through the Muslim world of late, there has been a surprising growth in the number of British converts to Islam in recent years; boxer Chris Eubank, snooker star Ronnie O’ Sullivan, musician Richard Thompson and footballer Freddie Kanoute, to name but a few. Even former Taliban kidnapee, journalist, Yvonne Ridley, whom I would have thought would never want to see another copy of the Koran again in her life, succumbed to Islam’s mystical allure.

What surprises me about British people becoming Muslims is that I would have thought they might consider Islam just a little scary. I’m not talking about the obvious ‘scary’ reasons here, you know, blowing people up, post 9/11 implied association with terrorism or the xenophobic fantasies of Robert Kilroy-Silk, no, I’m talking a different type of scary. The giving up of good old British normality scary; the exchange of one identity for another. If you’re born into the faith and its tacit cultural ties, however tenuously, as I was, you have to endure what’s foisted upon you in the name of your religion, whether you like it or not, but to join up of your own free will? That’s madness, surely? I spent half my life trying to escape its claustrophobic embrace, which makes me only more curious as to an outsider’s attraction to the world’s second largest religious institution.

I was unaware that London Mayoral reject, Frank Dobson’s son, Joe, had become a Muslim until my elder sister sent me some old newspaper cuttings about Westerners turning to Islam in an ongoing, vain attempt to get me to see the light and join her in her devotion to Allah. Sadly, Dobbo Junior’s transformation wasn’t enough to stir me into giving up my highly prized, doctrine of free life. Nor was the piece on Princess Diana’s supposed interest in Islam, inspired by romantic flings with a Muslim doctor, a Muslim surgeon and a Muslim playboy. Diana, it would seem, took a very hands-on approach in her particular voyage of discovery. At the rate she was going, were it not for her untimely death, the list might well have included half a dozen more high-profile Muslims. Good looks weren’t always a consideration, just look at Dodi. Salman Rushdie could have been next, perhaps even Abu Hamza the hook-handed cleric. Who knows? Had she lived and taken up art, she may at some point have knocked out a Tracey Emin style bedouin ‘love tent’, it would have been so cool.

Another of the articles my sister sent me was on Christiane Backer, a former MTV presenter who’d turned away from the world of television and was now concentrating on fulfilling her new found religious duties. Her conversion, I believe, had more than a little bit to do with her marrying a Muslim. I remember meeting her once at a book launch and was so struck by her beauty, I wanted to marry her too. If I’d have thought she would have been impressed by my half Egyptian/half English, pseudo-Muslim heritage, I would have done my utmost to make her aware of it rather than banging on about the stupid band I was in at the time. Like many other converts who have married into the religion, Christiane seems to be taking her acquired faith very seriously. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, in fact it’s quite sweet. It tells the world that, so devoted are you to your husband, that you’ll merrily take on board his beliefs as well as his name. It’s no worse than agreeing to support the same football team or pretending to like your new in-laws, I suppose.

Hass. My elder brother Hass’s embracing of Islam had nothing to do with falling in love with anyone. All through my life, Hass had been an incredibly big influence on me. He was almost two years older, which counts for quite a lot when you grow up with someone. As the eldest of the three boys in our family, he was always the first to ‘do stuff’, the pioneer, be it going to school, riding a bike, smoking cigarettes, having sex, taking drugs, whatever. I was never jealous of any of it, on the contrary, he was a guiding light. Whereas with Lutfi, who was almost two years younger than me, there was a lot of rivalry, jealousy and one-upmanship going on. None of that kind of behaviour existed between Hass and I. I aspired to be like Hass. To me he was well balanced, funny, a brilliant storyteller and an excellent footballer. He was a good brother too. He looked after me and Lutfi, Hass did.

It was Hass who encouraged me with my first band when we started out. It was he that booked, and even lost money, but never complained, on our first gig with The Buzzcocks in Manchester. After the band broke up, It was Hass and his friends I wanted to be with, to regain some focus and pick up the threads. Hanging out with him was more than just fun, it felt right. He was like a good version of me, I thought. Then one day in the Spring of 1980, the Hass I knew dropped off my radar scanner. The last time I’d spoken to him he was about to go camping with his girlfriend Diane at a three day hippie festival in Lancashire. The next time I saw him, an impostor had taken his place. The impostor had found God and become a devout Muslim.

I tried hard to understand him and his reasoning, but none of it made much sense. When Lutfi followed suit a couple of years later, I didn’t know what to think anymore. Two of my five sisters were already practising Muslims, which meant that nearly 50% of my family had been lost to religion. It was a mystery because there had been nothing in our upbringing to endear us whatsoever to, what was essentially, my father’s jettisoned belief system. If adultery, drinking, gambling and hypocrisy were the attributes of a good Muslim, my Dad was a paragon of all Islam stood for. So proud was he of his roots he changed his name from Aziz to ‘Jean Pierre’ and told everyone he was French.

My sisters, I’d come to take for granted for the way they were, but Hass and Lutfi had always been such rebels. We’d even formed our boyhood gang, The Black Aces, as a reaction against joining the Scouts. We didn’t ‘do’ movements or institutions. Hass hadn’t even lasted more than two terms at the supremely liberal North London Polytechnic because of what he considered the loss of freedom to stay home, smoke dope and read Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers’ comics. Religion was something that weird, insecure people got into. Why now, seemingly of his own free will, would he want to go and join that club?

Hass’s religious awakening, he later told me, was precipitated by an incident that occurred at the hippie festival in Lancashire. He and his girlfriend, Diane, had been taking a stroll above the valley the event was set in. It was sunset and very beautiful. They could see all the campfires and hustle and bustle below. As they walked down the side of the valley he heard, as clear as a bell, the call to prayer, or the Azan, as it’s known. “Strange” he said, “where could that be coming from? Can you hear it? That’s the Muslim call to prayer!” “What is?” Replied Diane “That is!” He replied, but she could hear nothing. He couldn’t understand why she couldn’t hear it. They went looking for the source, but found zilch. He took it, literally, as his calling. The experience was to change the course of his life forever.

My Dad, very likely the original ‘Original Sinner�